Black Nativity is a musical updating of the play by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston
Hughes, based very loosely on the way Jesus of Nazareth entered the world in a manger in
Bethlehem.

And once it finds its footing, the Harlem variation on the Nativity story manages to be sweet
and touching.

Credit the cast, especially the supporting players, and a sympathetic handling of the material
by writer-

director Kasi Lemmons (Talk to Me and
Eve’s Bayou). They ensure that the sentimental never turns maudlin, that the sermonizing
goes down lightly.

Jacob Latimore plays Langston, the Baltimore teenager who narrates the story and whose mom,
Naima (Jennifer Hudson), is about to lose their home.

“Ain’t no miracles,” the kid figures out. “Just money.”

Mom packs him off to live with her estranged parents, a preacher (Forest Whitaker) and his wife
(Angela Bassett). The Rev. Cornell Cobbs could have been just a judgmental stiff, mistrusting the
15-year-old who is no sooner off the bus than he is robbed and accused of robbing someone else.

In Whitaker’s masterly hands, the clergyman is an emotional man betraying moments of guilt and a
need to relate to the grandson he has never known.

Bassett is the very picture of a grandmother trying too hard to connect with the boy in the
hopes that he will lead her to a reunion with her daughter.

Tyrese Gibson has his best role in more than a decade, playing a street thug whose life re-

connects with Langston’s throughout the story.

The great Vondie Curtis-Hall portrays a wise and street-wise pawnbroker who says he knew
Langston’s dad. And Mary J. Blige plays an angelic parishioner at the Rev. Cobbs’ Holy Resurrection
Baptist Church.

Langston has shown up on Christmas Eve at the church, which is famous for its “Black Nativity”
pageant — a Kwanzaa-meets-New Testament spectacle in which the kid, hung up on coming up with Mom’s
mortgage money, isn’t interested.

This being a musical, and one featuring the Oscar-winning Hudson, characters break into
song.

Lemmons wisely keeps the film brisk and brief, not allowing it to overstay its welcome. It might
not reach the status of “holiday classic,” but the high-minded
Black Nativity is still modestly entertaining and uplifting.